Interestingly, this isn't school-bought/school-supported systems: this is student-brought, student-owned systems identified in "surveys of first-year residence halls." It appears to be a favorable a report on the effectiveness of Apple in selling to students before they actually become college students. The school hasn't had much opportunity to influence the purchase, presumably, other than perhaps to identify the list of supported operating systems or to let folks know about software they'll be required to use on campus.
The good news? They aren't chasing folks off non-MSFT systems with incompatibility claims, like some schools I know (when there was, in fact, no evidence of incompatibility), and broader use of standards has given MSFT competitors a foothold for competition.
I am going to guess that increasing student use of Apple products will have some reinforcing effects on the school's support priorities, including in its own hardware purchases.
Interestingly, the university's employees can get MS-Office (MS-Win or Mac) for use on a personally-owned machine for $10: http://www.itc.virginia.edu/ http://www.itc.virginia.edu/licenses/campusobtain.html (assuming you agree you're doing UVa work on it ... hmm, maybe Texas' deal for $20 and you can do anything you like on it is a better "deal")
It'll be interesting to see how this trend plots going forward. The charts depicting a trend from desktops to notebooks seem to have played to Apple's strengths, and it'll be interesting to see what plays out over the next few years. Speaking of corporate strengths, I noticed this on the page you linked with the OS chart:
... If MSFT's tools continue to behave for the next ten years as they have for the last ten years, competitors have a great opportunity to create migration tools and reliable alternatives. I'm guessing that MSFT is squeezing UVa for not only all the MS-Win boxes, but for licenses for all the Macs under the theory they can be used with BootCamp, which is now explicitly addressed in UVa's license agreement (which deals with, among other things, virtualization). When MSFT's demands get bad enough and the alternatives get good enough, organizations in UVa's position may consider site licenses for MS-Office without licenses for MSFT's OS, or the like. The cost for server tools is pretty steep from MSFT, and MSFT tends to license on a per-client basis (e.g., per email user) in addition to the cost for the server. I expect eventually the quality and convenience of the competing systems will lead to a crack in the exit barrier, with the exit driven by price.
I happen to think the next few quarters have some good news in them for Apple: iPhone-related (apps, app sales, enterprise apps, enterprise adoption, foreign iPhone deals, etc.), back-to-school related, and holiday/hardware related. I'm loaded up and am not planning selling anywhere soon.
Of course, we still need some semblance of rationality to prevail in enough of the market to make any good news useful in creating favorable pricing. Or maybe we just need the same craziness, but on the manic upswing :-) For my part, I'm betting Apple continues to provide fodder for folks looking for excuses to become giddy about its future.
(This, while remembering that Apple can take only so much hardware share before competing for market segments that are less profitable. If Apple gets 25% of the notebook market dollars in return for 16% of the notebook market units, it's clear the situation is only good for so much growth in the US. We might want to look for either a reason to believe Apple's got its stuff together abroad -- and is thus safe to hold -- or a reason to believe we've seen what Apple can do and get ready to pile out during a holiday-time party over Apple's inevitability to hit 350.)
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